It's interesting that while Firefox's line looks pretty stable, the Chrome line seems to mirror IE -- that is, the decrease for Chrome is balanced out by the increase for IE at the same points in time.

I don't know any reason why Chrome users would be more prone to switching to IE (it makes little sense) but that's how the graph reads to me. Firefox users just keep on using Firefox.

It seems like Microsoft has been trying to push really hard for people to swap back to IE.

I wonder what is causing people to go back to IE.

I actually really like IE. It's very fast and clean, and keeps out of the way nicely.

The only features that are keeping me from switching to IE full time are a lack of mouse gestures, and inability to create custom search prefixes from search fields.

After being able to type 'yt whitest kids u know' in the address bar to do a youtube search for whitest kids u know, or 'wp HMS Victoria' for a wiki search on the HMS Victoria for so long I can't use a browser that doesn't support that feature. I'm hoping that the IE team keeps adding features, because I wouldn't mind dropping Opera due to its incompatibility with some sites.

I think it's a quirk of StatCounter's data collection. Akamai IO, who also provides daily results, doesn't show anything comparable, though they don't allow their data to be narrowed to particular countries.

Well, it's getting better. Firefox and Chrome are no longer way ahead in terms of features. Firefox is still my main browser -- I haven't tried IE 10 yet -- but I no longer cringe when I fire up IE for some reason.

EDIT: Erm, wait, I am running IE 10. I suppose I don't recall upgrading and the difference hasn't been huge to me.

"Chrome and Firefox continue to show strong automatic update performance and continue to show a bunch of users that have disabled or refused automatic updates for reasons unknown."

I'm not sure what the problem is but FF's automatic update isn't working on my Moms laptop (will investigate in person at in a week and a half). She's running a non-admin account on a daily basis; with FF 17(?) originally installed from an admin account. I thought the auto-update service would update the browser even though no one normally logged in with an admin account; but about a month ago she emailed me for help because she ran into a site that blocked her for not running the most recent version.

I keep trying the new versions of IE, but they always take an irritatingly long time to load, or create a new tab. The new tab bit is particularly irritating because until you get that empty URL box, typing in the URL will affect the tab that was already open, not the new tab.

I keep trying the new versions of IE, but they always take an irritatingly long time to load, or create a new tab. The new tab bit is particularly irritating because until you get that empty URL box, typing in the URL will affect the tab that was already open, not the new tab.

Creating a new tab in IE10 works instantly on my laptop.

You should probably check if there are any plugins that slow it down, I had this issue in the past with a an ill behaved plugin.

You can check the plugins from the "Manage add-ons" option in the tools menu.

Ahh...a monthly gathering of IE/MS haters among Ars readers. I can just sense their frustration! lol

I see someone above asked why anyone would use IE over others. For me it's the opposite. When IE works just fine, why would I need to bother with 3rd party software from companies like Google who want nothing less than demise of Microsoft and Windows? Just doesn't make sense to me.

I think it's a quirk of StatCounter's data collection. Akamai IO, who also provides daily results, doesn't show anything comparable, though they don't allow their data to be narrowed to particular countries.

I believe you have world-wide data there. The anomaly I cited is US only and is swamped in StatCounter's WorldWide data as well.

World-wide is very nice, but for developers in the US such as myself it's the US data that is really interesting.

I think it's a bit of a dirty trick to push IE10 on Windows 7 as an "Important Update" rather than in the Optional section of Windows Update. For the sites I use for my work, IE10 (at least on Windows 7) is considerably slower navigating the pages, and one of them flat out breaks unless I enable compatibility mode on it. If there is one thing that pisses me off more than anything else, it's when good software is "upgraded" to a new version that has a new set of problems along with it. I like to choose when I'm beta testing a program, and sticking it in the automatic Windows Update which many people don't even look at before installing is just not cool.

Ahh...a monthly gathering of IE/MS haters among Ars readers. I can just sense their frustration! lol

I see someone above asked why anyone would use IE over others. For me it's the opposite. When IE works just fine, why would I need to bother with 3rd party software from companies like Google who want nothing less than demise of Microsoft and Windows? Just doesn't make sense to me.

IE often doesn't work just fine. IE9 doesn't support this push state magic, for example: http://diveintohtml5.info/history.html . I think IE10 does, but I'm sure there will be cool new things that IE10 won't support.

IE's settings menu is also a mess. Why isn't it searchable? I can only assume it's because Microsoft hates us all.

It seems like Microsoft has been trying to push really hard for people to swap back to IE.

I wonder what is causing people to go back to IE.

Here is a reason - if you have a touch-enabled Windows machine (i.e. many of the Windows 8 machines) IE is the only browser that has smooth behavior with touch (scroll and zoom). I am not talking about Metro apps but the regular Windows desktop. It seems like Windows has some touch APIs or something for scrolling and zooming and IE was the only browser that bothered to use them.

Ahh...a monthly gathering of IE/MS haters among Ars readers. I can just sense their frustration! lol

I see someone above asked why anyone would use IE over others. For me it's the opposite. When IE works just fine, why would I need to bother with 3rd party software from companies like Google who want nothing less than demise of Microsoft and Windows? Just doesn't make sense to me.

IE often doesn't work just fine. IE9 doesn't support this push state magic, for example: http://diveintohtml5.info/history.html . I think IE10 does, but I'm sure there will be cool new things that IE10 won't support.

IE's settings menu is also a mess. Why isn't it searchable? I can only assume it's because Microsoft hates us all.

IE 10 is missing Fullscreen API, Touch Events, Orientation Events, and WebGL. Presumably more as well, but those four are the ones that I have run into in the real world.

It certainly does support touch events. I can't argue about orientation, full screen, or Webgl support. They're super early, experimental stuff and many browsers that have support aren't following the latest spec, which is constantly changing.

It certainly does support touch events. I can't argue about orientation, full screen, or Webgl support. They're super early, experimental stuff and many browsers that have support aren't following the latest spec, which is constantly changing.

IE10 supports touch, but it doesn't support Touch Events, as that's an Apple-patented API that W3C wanted to standardize, but couldn't, due to Apple's refusal to offer a royalty-free patent license.

IE10 supports instead an API called Pointer Events. Chrome and Firefox are, I believe, planning to also implement Pointer Events. But this won't help Apple, thanks to the WebKit/Blink fork.

Ahh...a monthly gathering of IE/MS haters among Ars readers. I can just sense their frustration! lol

I see someone above asked why anyone would use IE over others. For me it's the opposite. When IE works just fine, why would I need to bother with 3rd party software from companies like Google who want nothing less than demise of Microsoft and Windows? Just doesn't make sense to me.

JButler -- I think if you had the opportunity to ask 100 web developers what they thought about MSIE, well 99 of them would tell you how much they hate MS and want IE to go away.

First you build a website, and then you try to fix the bugs in IE. I'm sure I've spent months of my life on this. It's a big deal and I'm not ready to forgive and forget.

For the record: MS created IE. They built it up until it destroyed the competition it had. Then they stuffed it full of proprietary extensions (ActiveX, etc) to lock in a market. And then they disbanded the team. They made sure that the bugs that got in during the mad dash to defeat Netscape would never get fixed.

Why would they do this? Because they saw that the web would one day be a competitor to locally installed software. And they held back the progress of the web for nearly ten years.

I think it's a quirk of StatCounter's data collection. Akamai IO, who also provides daily results, doesn't show anything comparable, though they don't allow their data to be narrowed to particular countries.

I believe you have world-wide data there. The anomaly I cited is US only and is swamped in StatCounter's WorldWide data as well.

World-wide is very nice, but for developers in the US such as myself it's the US data that is really interesting.

Yes, as I say, Akamai doesn't seem to have national filters.

If it's just a US thing then it seems to me even more likely that it's a StatCounter quirk rather than a genuine phenomenon. Spiking IE10 due to automatic updates would be one thing--but spiking IE9 too?

Regarding opera mini, anyone with the older Blackberries (pre-Bb10) use it from time to time. Opera mini and opera in general have very good memory management. Some websites with very large pages can max out the old blackberry browser.

Opera is going webkit in the future, so it may become a memory hog again.

Incidentally, the colors on that line chart are a challege for the colorblind, AKA me.

I think it's a quirk of StatCounter's data collection. Akamai IO, who also provides daily results, doesn't show anything comparable, though they don't allow their data to be narrowed to particular countries.

I believe you have world-wide data there. The anomaly I cited is US only and is swamped in StatCounter's WorldWide data as well.

World-wide is very nice, but for developers in the US such as myself it's the US data that is really interesting.

Yes, as I say, Akamai doesn't seem to have national filters.

If it's just a US thing then it seems to me even more likely that it's a StatCounter quirk rather than a genuine phenomenon. Spiking IE10 due to automatic updates would be one thing--but spiking IE9 too?

Could it be a quirk of IE? Like, maybe it hangs onto the old useragent until rebooted? Anyone want to test?

Ahh...a monthly gathering of IE/MS haters among Ars readers. I can just sense their frustration! lol

I see someone above asked why anyone would use IE over others. For me it's the opposite. When IE works just fine, why would I need to bother with 3rd party software from companies like Google who want nothing less than demise of Microsoft and Windows? Just doesn't make sense to me.

JButler -- I think if you had the opportunity to ask 100 web developers what they thought about MSIE, well 99 of them would tell you how much they hate MS and want IE to go away.

First you build a website, and then you try to fix the bugs in IE. I'm sure I've spent months of my life on this. It's a big deal and I'm not ready to forgive and forget.

For the record: MS created IE. They built it up until it destroyed the competition it had. Then they stuffed it full of proprietary extensions (ActiveX, etc) to lock in a market. And then they disbanded the team. They made sure that the bugs that got in during the mad dash to defeat Netscape would never get fixed.

Why would they do this? Because they saw that the web would one day be a competitor to locally installed software. And they held back the progress of the web for nearly ten years.

It's ok to be angry about this.

This is getting to be a tired, old argument.

You prefer one browser and you make your sites using it, then you begrudgingly need to make sure it works on other browsers. The primary "other browser" is Internet Explorer, so you get angry at it.

Trust me, as someone who is on the other foot (corporate, starting on IE and then making sure it works on Firefox/Chrome/Safari), your angst shouldn't be targeted at Microsoft and it is not hard to make a site that works on all of them.

You just can't use all the fancy features of your preferred browser. You need to stick to the standards.

Which I might add is the same reason why IE6 is still around, because someone tailored their application too heavily to non-standard features of the browser.

So, the problem is in your head, not the browser.

Also, Netscape is not dead. It's alive and well but named Firefox now and has a loyal following (myself included).

Ahh...a monthly gathering of IE/MS haters among Ars readers. I can just sense their frustration! lol

I see someone above asked why anyone would use IE over others. For me it's the opposite. When IE works just fine, why would I need to bother with 3rd party software from companies like Google who want nothing less than demise of Microsoft and Windows? Just doesn't make sense to me.

JButler -- I think if you had the opportunity to ask 100 web developers what they thought about MSIE, well 99 of them would tell you how much they hate MS and want IE to go away.

First you build a website, and then you try to fix the bugs in IE. I'm sure I've spent months of my life on this. It's a big deal and I'm not ready to forgive and forget.

For the record: MS created IE. They built it up until it destroyed the competition it had. Then they stuffed it full of proprietary extensions (ActiveX, etc) to lock in a market. And then they disbanded the team. They made sure that the bugs that got in during the mad dash to defeat Netscape would never get fixed.

Why would they do this? Because they saw that the web would one day be a competitor to locally installed software. And they held back the progress of the web for nearly ten years.

It's ok to be angry about this.

This is getting to be a tired, old argument.

You prefer one browser and you make your sites using it, then you begrudgingly need to make sure it works on other browsers. The primary "other browser" is Internet Explorer, so you get angry at it.

Trust me, as someone who is on the other foot (corporate, starting on IE and then making sure it works on Firefox/Chrome/Safari), your angst shouldn't be targeted at Microsoft and it is not hard to make a site that works on all of them.

You just can't use all the fancy features of your preferred browser. You need to stick to the standards.

Which I might add is the same reason why IE6 is still around, because someone tailored their application too heavily to non-standard features of the browser.

So, the problem is in your head, not the browser.

Also, Netscape is not dead. It's alive and well but named Firefox now and has a loyal following (myself included).

No, no, no, no. You are making a false equivalency. There are web standards, and then there is IE. When you develop to the standard, all the browsers fall in line with very few exceptions. Webkit, Mozilla, Opera, all behave in more or less the same way.

IE, traditionally, does not. For this reason, if you look at the source of your favorite website, you'll see that there is css for all browsers, and then there is css for ie7, and then css for ie8, and then css for ie9. IE10 is nearly there, but of course not quite. Still missing significant functionality.

And even if you accept the notion that Microsoft is allowed to build to their own standard, how can you excuse the neglect they showed IE 6? Developers had to workaround bugs in this product for TEN YEARS. Here:

I understand the logic behind some people not upgrading beyond IE6 because of legacy app compatibility, but at the same time I have no sympathy for them if they are a victim of some type of browser based cyber attack.

Just my thoughts but if the developer of an app still hasn't upgraded said app to be compatible with something a little more recent (and worlds more secure) just how much attention should you really keep giving them if they aren't taking your business' security seriously?

It seems like Microsoft has been trying to push really hard for people to swap back to IE.

I wonder what is causing people to go back to IE.

I actually really like IE. It's very fast and clean, and keeps out of the way nicely.

The only features that are keeping me from switching to IE full time are a lack of mouse gestures, and inability to create custom search prefixes from search fields.

After being able to type 'yt whitest kids u know' in the address bar to do a youtube search for whitest kids u know, or 'wp HMS Victoria' for a wiki search on the HMS Victoria for so long I can't use a browser that doesn't support that feature. I'm hoping that the IE team keeps adding features, because I wouldn't mind dropping Opera due to its incompatibility with some sites.

You can do that with Chrome too, but it's a bit of a hassle to set up. The day when Opera get separate thread processes and all that performance/stability jazz is the time I switch back to Opera. It's just an unbeatable feature-set.